NEWS One of the first felony spam convictions in the US has been overturned - and the judge thought jurors in the case were bamboozled by technological terms.
Jessica DeGroot was jailed along with her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, earlier this year after being convicted of spamming offences. Judge Thomas D. Horne ruled that there was no "rational basis" for DeGroot's conviction and added that the anti-spam law used to convict the pair had perplexed the jurors.
He said the jurors may have got "lost" in the law, according to reports.
DeGroot had been sentenced to pay $7,500 after the pair were found guilty of sending thousands emails to AOL addresses in 2003. Her brother was jailed for nine years for masterminding the spam operation.
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1. Adrian
Now I hate spam as much as everyone else, I have to deal with a companies worth everyday.
But how did the guy get 9 years in prision for it?
There are some much more serious problems, such as assault and that kind of thing say, where people get off with less than that.
Fully in favour of spammers being punished, but that's a bit weird.....
2. anonymous
Adrian, bear in mind spammers are in this to earn a lot of money, so purely financial penalties aren't going to deter them. 9 years does sound a bit harsh, but then again we don't know any details of the case, it might be for how the details were obtained, or the nature of the spam? The media likes to use emotive statements without giving any background so they get people leaving comments at the bottom of stories like we're doing.
3. Ruth
Sorry, but I believe spammers deserve everything they get. Day after day our department at work gets bombarded with e-mails offering us enhanced body parts, dodgy medicines & some really nasty porno ones that are very offensive. We've got spam detection applications running but the spammers get cleverer & cleverer at finding ways round that. So our servers get overworked, our mailboxes get jammed & it can be quite difficult & time consuming to ensure that the e-mails you delete are only the spam ones. Another disgrace, in my opinion, is that if you forward the e-mail to spam@ the relevent ISPs (personally I seem to get a lot of yahoo based spam e-mails) nothing seems to happen. As well as punishment for spammers, I think there should be punishment for ISPs who do nothing to prevent spam being sent under their name when they are informed of that fact.